Hi Wally, another coolly interactive thread. I find paying your own fees is highly motivational, as is being very, very poor and knowing that the sooner the PhD is finished the sooner full-time work and pay will be possible.

Aside from that: Saturday Night Fever makes me feel motivated in most aspects of life.

I also find 'just doing it' quite effective.

I want a PhD, which offers less turn around time: a month or two would be great. Oh! and then a postdoc which pays about 70k PA.

Yes, I'm utterly gorgeous too; that's why I spend so much time on line out of sight, I wouldn't want to provoke a frenzy amongst the general public. See IIIIIII have selfless moral fibre, even of no one else around here does.

Great to have you on the thread raging; I haven't read the book, it just helps me to write things down here. Must press on.

Here are my reasons:

1. I really enjoy the work and it might lead to me getting paid to do it. I love my subject and I love learning to write; I also feel I'm workking on something worthwhile and significant. Getting to do all this while being at home listening to Kate Bush is brill, a bit of that plus money would be fabulous.
2. It's the only way to get a permanent job in academia, and I like workng in academia.
3. I'm getting the chance to reach my potential, which is a very good thing.
4. You get to procrastinate with a better class of person.
5. My parents wouldn't commit suicide if I quit. (black joke born of recent bitter experiences)

Lostinoz, I too think you should consider whether or not this is the right path for you. Even if your parents got upset, they'd have to deal with it, they can't control your life forever. As I think Wally said earlier, yo have to bring some positivity to your PhD

Hey Maria I like that: the most important quality for a PhD student is to be a sucker for punishment, that definitely applies to me, I really look forward to sitting at my desk and working, I don't mind the poverty (so long as I can pay the rent, bills, fares which I have somehow managed to do so far). My friends have always thought of me as the brainy, academic one right since school, they're all creatives, the old school friends are fashion people, but they don't think I'm better than them or whatever, they're not in awe or anything like that. They've seen me in too many compromisingly daft situations. When I first started the PhD a few of the old friends did think I was completely crackers for making such a massive financial sacrifice and some of them just think I'm mad for wanting to study all day every day.

So yeah, I think a sucker for punishment, or in other words, not minding living in poverty and devoting your life to study. Oh, and you do have to have something of a brain, that is if you're going to finish in less than 12 years. 

Hi Bulbs, sounds like your nodes are going well, I'm very curious about the node trees. And good luck with the transcripts you're working on.

Today I finished and typed up the first draft of my chapter abstract. It's currently 750 words and it needs to come down too 500; I also need to make sure it's pulling together efectively, so that's what I'll work on tomorrow. It must be finished by tomorrow night because I have to send it to the sup on Friday and I'm working Friday day and out on that evening. So tomorrow I will:

Re-draft the abstract until it is concise yet comprehensive, and 500 words long - and try and be relaxed about it so it flows well.

I saw Up today, it was great. Especially as I had the whole auditorium to myself, laughed myself silly, and had a good old cry: I recommend seeing kids films on a weekday during term-time.  Not quite as good as The Fantastic Mr. Fox IMO though.

I recently saw a documentary about IQ and race, and saw the director speak about it with a Q&A, and according to him and some other researchers in that field (I think it would be psychology), IQ tests have long been discredited as too culturally biased: they said that the tests basically measrure person's ability to navigate the modern, westernised world, not any innate abilty and success in them has a lot to do with learned culture. Apparently, different cultural/racial groups get different scores, and research suggests its becaue they value different ways of thinking and navigating the world. Wasn't IQ invented as a way of segregating people? Eugenics and all that? I took one once and can remember thinking how culturally loaded it was. I only idid it because I was feeling really insecure about my abilities, I think that's why people do it, and perhaps also why they wave their results in the air too. I got something like 135 overall, about 80 for maths and abut 175 for conceptual intelligence. So that gets me off calculating the bill at the end of the Christmas dinner out...

Hopefully, I will be a doctor of film one day. If only I could stop procrastinating on this forum; then one day I may get there. Must sleep soon so I can work tomorrow, do some more dissaecting! the films I study would be on my favourites list too, but they're looking a bit messy from being on the dissecting table...

Hi Heiffer, American Beauty is my all time least favourite film! It brings me out in a terrible rash; I'm not trying to be controversial, I just luuurrrve to hate this film. War of the Roses, to me, did it much, much better and without the narcissism of Mendes and the yucky misogyny that ran through AB. I found it quite 2 dimensional.

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Well, I daren't make any jokes about Pretty Woman...




I don't have a favourite film: I love 'em all. But recently, I went to see The Fantastic Mr. Fox which blew me away - I recomend it highly. I love Powell and Pressburger, of course, and yes! That's it, I've just remebered, the film I have watched most often (aside from ones I study) is Moonstruck (1987) starring Cher, Olivia Dukakis and the gorgeous Nicolas Cage: 'My haaaannnd, my haaaannnnd' phhhwoooar. Lovely, lovely film too. I discovered it in about 1996 and have been addicted ever since. And Grease and Saturday Night Fever, both of which have featurerd heavily in my couch lounging life since my teenage years. Oh yeah, I love Disney's Beauty and the Beast too.


Do you think your boss was trying too suss people out? He sounds as if he could have been a bit David Brentish.

P.S. I didn't say why! So here goes: I like the fantastic mr fox because I saw it on my day off, eating sweets in the cinema, it was funky, funny and cool in the most cultured sense of the word; I love P&P movies for their otherwordly spiritual quality and for their beautiul colours; I love Grease because its just so much fun and is guaranteed to put me in a good mood, but quite real too; I love Sat Fever for the passion, dancing, music and reaity; Moonstruck because it is the most romantic film I have ever seen, about life, love, and everything (Cage is a fab bonus); and Beauty and the Beast because I'm a daft girly who likes singing along with the Maurice Chavalier candlestick.

Whhhahaha, Wally, that's hilarious! I mean, really hilarious! The most exciting thing that happened at our school was music teacher dating a sixth former. Clearly teaching pay was pretty bad back then; did sell his story to the daily wail dressed in a satin nighty?

You know what Slowmo, All this has really made me think I wish I could do this; I mean 300 quid an hour, flip, in three hours I'd make month's wages. But I know I couldn't do it.

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Bug: this goes way beyond theory; I have a personal connection to Bunuel's Belle de Jour, it has been very important to me. It is one of the few texts which speaks fluently about an issue which gets very little air time (even less than the realitites of prostituion), and good on her if she wants to get on in life and make some money, but I can be p'd off about what she's done to the idea of Belle de Jour if i want. yes, we differ, but that's ok.



RubyW: I dresed people in the media eye every day of my working life for several years; that is an entirely different situation to teaching contextual studies to fashion students: the mind is trained to critique and find ways to flatter different individuals, rather like correcting grammar does when you become a teacher. Sometimes, when I am on the bus I alternate between involuntary responses to misplaced apostrophes and tetchy, yes to my shame, trinny and Susanah like responses to ill-advised sartotial combinations. I have an instinctive desire to correct both, and the latter is one of hte reasons I changed career: I, personally, feel apostrophes are far more important than shoes.